The Afterlife and the In-Between

June 2001

Give me a moment to tell you what has transpired. 

I am having a hard time. I am having flashbacks of some things that seem like a never ending dream or something you could describe when you stand on the edge of a cliff.

You know you could slip and fall and yet you take that step out into thin air. And you’re falling and falling until you hit the ground. You’re laying there, motionless, fragments of dust and dry air has filled your throat and you feel the bones of your spine shatter slowly. You can see pieces of rock and debris falling towards you. You lie there still. 

As a little girl I always thought of what it would be to grow up. To become a woman of perhaps power, a wife, a mother or even one of those women who sat in their cold brick like homes by the window sill waiting for their pocket filled husbands to come home with the bacon. 

Does it make sense at all? 

Doesn’t it make you wonder that sometimes growing up makes you tolerate all your worst fears as you take that step each way of your life?

I always thought that I would have a normal life, I would finish school, go to university, find a job and a nice husband and the rest follows. Well, most girls my age at some point in time thought of things like that. I would speak to mum a lot about that. The relationship we shared was a beautiful one. We were like best friends and did most girly things together. I suppose to some extent she spoilt me as well which was quite evident after her passing. I could not even make a cup of tea.

I lost my mum when I was 20. 

She was a short woman, with straight hair, fair skinned and petite. She was a beautiful woman who never seemed to complain of why it would rain on washing day after the sky had promised the sun, or what she was going to cook for dinner. She only raised her voice when my brother continuously pestered me or pretended that he was studying when all the time he would have the light switched on in his room but he would be asleep.

It all started after my trip to New Zealand. Even now, I ask myself several hundreds of times, would it have been so different if I had not gone away or if I had decided to stay back? One thing instantaneously led to the other and that’s where I think my in between life waited for me patiently.

She never told me she was getting ill. Perhaps she did not want to worry me but then again, which mother would want to worry their off-spring.

Being diagnosed with terminal colon cancer at the very late stage is a never ending saga apart from the changing colostomy bags. But she would lie there and still not complain and tell me things of how pretty my hair looked or ask me whether my brother had decided what he wanted to do with his life or whether my father was pleased with his dinner. She just lay there.

Her eyes, I vividly remember, her twinkling bright eyes, would close gently with a sense of serenity the minute the nurse injected her veins with a soothing shot of pethidine or maybe morphine if it ran out of stock.

I spent many nights at the hospital waiting and watching and contemplating. There were times when my tears would just dry up from the inside of my eye even before I could start to cry when I could only imagine how much pain a human body could tolerate. She described her pain as tingling, pricking and piercing of a thousand needles inside her stomach. It would stop and start again. She looked thin and frail, like a porcelain doll. Her youth was eaten alive and her skin described a barren wasteland. She looked as if she would shatter into millions of pieces if she fell.

She did fall, on the day prior to the night of her death. The night that I had been some what anticipating and contemplating for. The night I thought I would actually see a soul or energy being released and finally descend into thin air from the placebo we call our body. I missed it. I missed it by seconds that turned into minutes. It would have been the most beautiful moment of my life. I would have done anything to be there.  I know she would have said something or made some gesture to re-assure me that it was all OK. That she was OK. But she never did because I was not there.

There’s so much more to that moment I could describe but I would rather not. I don’t think a moment like that can be described. I remember as if it happened yesterday, the last night I spent with her at the hospital. It would have had to be the most miserable, yet memorable night of my entire life and I swear by all the powers under the sun that I would do anything to have that night again.

Tolerance is an amazing word and to some extent it becomes a passion. 

When you are able to tolerate the most difficult of circumstances, I believe you are able to conquer the world. 

My most precious memory of her is when finally fell asleep on my lap in the early hours of rainy Friday morning. That was after her last shot of pethidine. The side of her thigh was so thin, there was hardly any flesh at all and it seemed like a sheet of brown silk was dropped over her bones. The nurse seemed exhausted as well. She stuck the needle into whatever was left of my mother, nodded her head and walked away. All I saw was a tear running down her cheek as she held my hand while I ran my fingers through her straight black hair and hummed her some hymns. It was close to four o’clock.

I had not slept and could feel my eyes burning. 

How could I have slept?

She had exhausted all means of medication by that time. Her pain threshold was so unimaginable that there was no more room for drugs in her system. Her disease had eaten her alive, the effect of the drugs died gradually and finally her will to survive surpassed by all means.

I think she was ready.

She crouched into a foetal position and fell asleep. She died on a rainy and dreary Friday night of 7 June 2001...and I missed that moment of her last breath perhaps by 5 minutes.

It was only when I began to remove her personal effects from her bedside and the pictures of me which she had stuck by her bed, when the nurse told me, “She was asking for you”.

Mum managed to lift whatever her energy allowed her to with her hand, pointed at my pictures on the wall and asked for me. My father confirmed this after the funeral and to this day, I keep contemplating on what she would have told me.  

  

Was it meant to be? 

Was I not supposed to experience something that I had mentally and emotionally prepared myself for the past 18 month?

Upon reaching the hospital, my father was already sitting by her bedside. I walked over to the bed and saw her in the most peaceful slumber. It was all over...

 I couldn’t cry. 

I wouldn’t cry. 

There was no need to. 

I needed a moment to myself at that particular point in time.

So did my dad and my brother.

It took us maybe three years to have that moment.